Monday, August 06, 2007

Plaxo Unveils Next-Generation Social Network : Pulse

As a major enhancement to the recently announced beta of the all-new Plaxo, the company today unveiled its next-generation social network, Pulse. Harnessing the power of the open social web, Pulse now pulls in "people feeds" from a large and rapidly growing list of sites, and enables conversations about the resulting content stream — within your family, around your circle of friends or across your business network.

Pulse brings your address book to life with what the people you actually know and care about are creating, discovering, and saying online. To check your Pulse, or to choose the feeds you want to share, go to: pulse.plaxo.com.

Pulse pioneers the powerful concept of "people feeds," which is the notion of being subscribed to the people in your address book, and then automatically receiving the content they choose to share with you from any of the various sites they use. The list of sites from which Pulse is aggregating such people feeds now includes: Amazon.com, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo! 360, Yelp, and YouTube. Many more are on the way, thanks to user-centric sharing policies and open standards for exchange of data, including RSS, OpenID and microformats.

"Pulse represents the natural evolution of Plaxo," said Todd Masonis, Founder and VP of Products. "It's all about keeping you more richly connected to the people you actually know, by transforming your address book into a true social network for your real personal and professional relationships."

In addition to the people feeds from external sites, this enhanced release of the Pulse service also includes a variety of features to facilitate social interaction with the people you already know and care about, including:

One-to-One Connections, designed for easy categorization of relationships into family, friends, or business network

A Share Bar, for quick sharing of messages, links, or videos selectively with family, friends, or business network

And non-anonymous commenting, enabling genuine conversations about the content flowing through the system within your family, around your circle of friends, and across your business network.